Versteven Marijke, Vanden Broeck Lies, Geurten Bart, Zwarts Liesbeth, Decraecker Lisse, Beelen Melissa, Göpfert Martin C, Heinrich Ralf, Callaerts Patrick
Laboratory of Behavioral and Developmental Genetics, Department of Human Genetics, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
VIB Center for the Biology of Disease, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Feb 21;114(8):1958-1963. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1605946114. Epub 2017 Jan 23.
Aggression is a universal social behavior important for the acquisition of food, mates, territory, and social status. Aggression in is context-dependent and can thus be expected to involve inputs from multiple sensory modalities. Here, we use mechanical disruption and genetic approaches in to identify hearing as an important sensory modality in the context of intermale aggressive behavior. We demonstrate that neuronal silencing and targeted knockdown of hearing genes in the fly's auditory organ elicit abnormal aggression. Further, we show that exposure to courtship or aggression song has opposite effects on aggression. Our data define the importance of hearing in the control of intermale aggression and open perspectives to decipher how hearing and other sensory modalities are integrated at the neural circuit level.
攻击行为是一种普遍存在的社会行为，对于获取食物、配偶、领地和社会地位至关重要。攻击行为取决于具体情境，因此可以预期它涉及多种感觉模态的输入。在这里，我们在果蝇中使用机械干扰和基因方法来确定听觉是雄性间攻击行为情境下的一种重要感觉模态。我们证明，果蝇听觉器官中神经元的沉默和听觉基因的靶向敲低会引发异常攻击行为。此外，我们表明，接触求偶或攻击歌曲对攻击行为有相反的影响。我们的数据确定了听觉在控制雄性间攻击行为中的重要性，并为解读听觉和其他感觉模态如何在神经回路水平上整合开辟了新的视角。
